George Osborne should be pleased with himself for coining the phrase ‘the march of the makers’. He has certainly rolled it off his tongue plenty of times, and it has usefully reminded us all that we shouldn’t forget about manufacturing, which has for so long been cast into the policy wilderness. But the government’s support for the ‘makers’ has been more about attracting investment into the automotive industry, or moderating energy prices, rather than bolstering an army of craftspeople tinkering in sheds. For the creative industries, the term ‘makers’ signifies something quite different from what the Treasury might think. Not steel magnates, chemical suppliers or factory owners, but artisans and inventors.

Although statistics around this amorphous movement are hard to come by, there are clear indicators that something important is happening.

The phenomenon of the communal workshop is taking off, under various names: there are now thousands of ‘hackspaces’, ‘maker spaces’, or ‘fab labs’ globally. The Fab Lab began life in MIT’s Media Lab in 2001, and there are now some 307 worldwide. Prominent UK maker spaces include Makerversity, bunkered under Somerset House, the Blackhorse Workshop in Walthamstow, and Fab Labs in Manchester and Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. There is also the hybrid concept Maker Library Network, embryonic at the moment but growing. Taken together these efforts are partly about providing much needed work facilities for small or single-person businesses in the creative/ manufacturing sector, and partly about allowing the wider community to delve into what is usually the outsourced function of making and fixing.

Other signs of the maker revolution include trendy blogs – for example http://makeworks.co.uk/, http://makeitbritish.co.uk/ – about the pioneers/ rebels who are obstinately still making stuff in the UK. Internationally we have seen the rise of Etsy, the online marketplace for makers that launched in 2005, and by the end of last year had 30 million users and US$1 billion of transactions. These grassroots-driven platforms are slowly shaking off the crusty old (male) notion of manufacturing as a dirty industry devoid of human hand – and often drawing the connection back between craft and manufacturing.

We’re also seeing the emergence of new ‘blended’ businesses – which are often labelled ‘tech’ – but are in reality more of a hybrid between design-digital-craft-tech-fabrication. The Brighton Fuse project highlighted this new blended kind of activity nicely, but in general it’s something we don’t seem to have the right policy/ industrial language to describe yet. Over the last couple of years I’ve met digital start-ups that quaintly describe themselves as ‘foundries’, and businesses (very often in ‘tech city’) that work across what we would traditionally think of as manufacturing, craft, the arts. These businesses embody the spirit of experiment that characterised the first industrial revolution far more than those established manufacturing businesses that are the descendants of it.

What can we learn from these places/ collectives/ trends?

Is it a passing fashion – or is there some deeper systemic change going on? Perhaps, as we move into the digital world, we’re all craving an enhanced connection with the material. It’s also interesting to note the open source/ sharing approach of this movement: might we see hackspaces as the coffee houses of the 21st century? With a predominant demographic of digital/ social media natives, it’s certainly a far more open and social community than the traditional manufacturing sector.

The ethos of the movement is congruent with a wider rebellion against traditional economies, the people-powered move towards ‘collaborative consumption’. And it is a timely reminder in a period of increasing privatisation of city space that cities work best when they are about sharing resources. All in all – this should be seen as a good thing. This is about rebellion against outsourcing and having no idea how the things we depend on in the western world are made. It’s about democratising production and distribution. And it’s about providing spaces that nurture creative activity in an inclusive way.

So – as an alternative spin on Osborne’s policies for makers – how can this resurgence of making be nurtured?

Well, for once, it’s probably not worth demanding that we ‘put it on the curriculum’. Not only because that’s what every business group in the country is trying to do, but also because an assessment-driven environment would be lethal to the culture of tinkering. However, the following would all help:

Above all else, the maker movement needs space. Creative makers are increasingly being priced out of city centres even though the ideas and inventiveness they bring are what make cities exciting, successful places. Planning regulations need to resist the rush to residential and generic commercial development, and local authorities should be prepared to do more to provide and protect the kind of light industrial workspaces that are needed.

Many of the best publicly provided facilities, from kilns to soldering irons, are found in school and FE college design and technology labs, and these should be made more widely available at out-of-hours times. Other community facilities could also be put to use – might libraries’ mandate to provide public access to knowledge extend to ‘knowledge of making’?

More broadly, industrial policy needs to be hauled into the 21st century. I would be amazed if many civil servants had thought deeply about the maker movement, or the idea of the fused/ blended business, their significance and their relationship to traditional manufacturing. We need to update our language, our thinking and our departmental structures, to shake off the false dichotomy between ‘the creative industries’ and other parts of the economy. If innovation policy only focuses on the narrow measure of economic growth via the unhelpfully termed ‘high-tech’, it will miss much of the innovation that promises to revitalize not just the creative economy, but towns, cities and the country as a whole.